A Two-Day Live Online Workshop with Lissa Rankin, MD & Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv

HEALING THROUGH RELATIONSHIP

Intimacy as a Path of Transformation

Saturday, January 4th and Sunday, January 5th, 2025 from 9:00am to 3:00pm PT

Some seek out sanctuary in relationships, a safe, nurturing connection that serves as a refuge. Others glorify the painful challenge of intimacy as a spiritual path, even if it means you never relax and enjoy each other. Healing relationships offer both- safe refuge and transformational crucible, secure sanctuary and catalytic growth.

Are you a trauma survivor or someone struggling to love a trauma survivor?

Are you committed to navigating your personal and spiritual growth, not as a rugged individualist, but as a committed intimate partnership devoted to a greater Us- yet you’re finding intimate partnership extremely challenging?

Maybe you’ve taken on the challenge of loving someone with a severe trauma history who resists intimacy with every fiber of their being, and you need a community of practice. Or maybe you’re that severe trauma survivor who sabotages every chance you get to love someone healthy, because intimacy terrifies you. 

Maybe you take on intimate relationships as a rescuer and only get the hots for damsels or dudes in distress whothat need you to be their hero or heroine. Or maybe you’re that damsel or dude who indulges rescue fantasies because you can’t quite handle “adulting.”

Maybe you struggle in relationships because you feel like you’re the healthier one and your partner isn’t as committed to growth as you are? Or maybe you feel like you can’t keep up with the pace of your partner’s growth, you’ll never measure up, and you’re tempted to just throw in the towel because no amount of effort ever seems to satisfy your partner. Maybe you’re committed to a healing relationship as a growth path, and yet your attachment style and your partner’s are so different that you wonder if you’ll ever get your needs met. Maybe you’ve finally realized conflict avoidance doesn’t lead to real intimacy, and you’re ready to try a braver way to relate. Maybe intimate relationships feel like climbing Mount Everest, and yet you’re too lonely without one to feel fulfilled. Maybe you’ve had your heart broken one too many times, but you’re still holding out hope and looking for ways to show up in relationships that might have a happier ending..

If you resonate with these struggles, you’re not alone. HEALING THROUGH RELATIONSHIP is here to support your journey.

If so, we invite you to a Zoom weekend retreat focused on what the future can hold.

In the past, spiritual life often meant withdrawing from intimate relationships. If you wanted to walk the spiritual path, you became a nun or a monk or a priest. You left your family and moved into an ashram to go follow a Guru and devote your life to God. Human relationships were seen as an obstacle to the spiritual path. But times they are a-changing. The pandemic blew up many spiritual communities and revealed the dark underbelly beneath, leaving more and more of us to explore what spirituality means beyond the conflict avoidance of and unhealthy tolerance of spiritual bypassing. 

Many of us seekers are asking “Now what?” and finding ourselves called to walk the path of intimacy with a beloved other or as part of an intimate community as an intentional, alchemical growth path. Instead of being an obstacle to spiritual and psychological development, our relationships can actually be the portal to a deepening connection with Love- love for our own “parts” and also love for others. Internal Family Systems (IFS) offers us a seeker’s path that is intimately relational- not just with other people, but with our own hurt or protective “parts” inside.

If you’re committed to the ascetic or individualistic path, that’s great. Everyone is entitled to their own journey.

But if you sense that your journey is meant to deepen through your experience in relationship with others, to allow your intimate relationships to be both the sanctuary of refuge your wounded parts need for healing- and also the sand in the oyster polishing the pearl, HEALING THROUGH RELATIONSHIP is designed to help you facilitate both. 

In this workshop, you can expect practical, actionable tools and practices intended to support your relationships, improve the quality of your connection, add joy and pleasure to your intimate connections, help you navigate conflicts with less disconnection, and take advantage (in the best way) of triggers that arise so you can support each other in healing core wounds that inevitably arise any time you try to get anywhere close to touching someone’s attachment trauma. Since it’s a New Year, land since the world can feel unstable in times like this, let’s focus on what we can make better- the depth, quality, safety, intimacy, and yumminess of our relationships.

This workshop is for you if ...

  • You’re single and contemplating intimacy as a transformational path, you’re dating and looking for a partner willing to join you on this path, you’re in a committed relationship looking to better understand how, or maybe you have a bestie interested in joining you in this way;
  • You’ve let your commitment to unconditional love turn you into a doormat- and you’re ready to shift that;
  • You have difficulty saying no and fear letting others down;
  • You are perpetually the giver who keeps picking relationships with people who take more than they give and leave you feeling resentful and uncared for;
  • ​You’re in recovery from growing up in a narcissistic family or getting involved with a narcissistic partner, business colleague, or friend- and you’re ready to change all that;
  • ​You’re feeling the urge to bring a romantic partner or a best friend to this workshop so you can enjoy the benefits of healing together, rather than white knuckling through your healing as a rugged individualist;
  • ​You’re not in a healing relationship yet, but you’re hoping that learning about healing relationships helps you find one;
  • ​You’re struggling in a relationship with someone who is less interested in healing trauma and growing spiritually than you are;
  • ​You’ve always been the giver, the responsible one, the one who carries most of the emotional labor in a relationship- but now you’re feeling the need for more reciprocity in your relationships;
  • You’re in recovery from spiritual bypassing tendencies- and now you’re realizing the rubber meets the road in your close relationships;
  • Instead of running away from conflict, you’re feeling healed enough to finally lean in and glean all the gold that healthy rupture and repair can help you unearth;
  • ​Instead of tolerating brutality in your relationship in the name of “I’m growing now,” you’re ready to receive more pleasure, more gentleness, more generosity, more safety, more cherishing, more nurturing;
  • You’re committed to kindness and compassion, but you’re not willing to “people please” or to be influenced by what “everybody” thinks anymore
  • ​You’re dealing with a health issue and interested in the positive and negative impact relationships can have on your health 
  • ​You care about the medicinal properties of healing the broken heart, for the purposes of addressing medical or psychiatric conditions
  • ​You’re ready to get your groove on, in an embodied, experiential way, in a community of open-hearted creatively-inclined individuals who understand that you can only heal so much with your intellect;
  • ​You’re ready to explore the “how” of healing the broken heart using the first steps in the Internal Family Systems (IFS) process;
  • ​You can feel the pain of the unhealed betrayal in your heart, and you’re ready to begin to blossom rather than scar up around the pain;
  • ​You’re excited to gather together with others committed to relational intimacy as a spiritual path 

If this sounds like you, this live interactive Zoom workshop may be just what the doctor ordered. Learning to grow and heal through intimate relationships can be a beautiful healing path with deep, long-lasting rewards. 

HEALING THE HEART

This is a workshop for anyone interested in deepening their relationships and taking advantage of the inevitable triggers that arise in relationship for the purposes of healing, transformation, and personal or spiritual growth. Whether it's a romantic relationship, family members, a best friend, or any other emotionally intimate connection, relationships as a path of transformation can help us heal the past, grow our capacity to love, and improve our health.

We will explore your deepest yearnings, discuss the potential for healing relational trauma in relationship, and get to know yourself and those you care about more deeply through a series of explorations, teachings and creative writing processes to offer ourselves a chance to risk intimacy, share, come together, and create a sanctuary for healing. Come welcome in the New Year with ritual, storytime, circle sharing, Internal Family Systems meditation, movement, and creative writing.

“IFS can be seen as attachment theory taken inside, in the sense that the client’s Self becomes the good attachment figure to their insecure or avoidant parts.” -Dick Schwartz, IFS founder

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”–Khalil Gibran

We’ll Discuss Provocative Questions

We’ll discuss provocative questions and come together in community to discover collective answers. Like how do you balance opening your heart, trusting, and falling love with protecting yourself, being cautious, and keeping some distance so as not to get shattered? How can you change what you're attracted to so that you're not attracting people with the worst qualities of your parents? What do you do when the balance is off in every single relationship and you wind up always giving to someone who’s happy to take? How can you distinguish between people who are high on the narcissism spectrum from those who get flooded with empathy and behave in ways that feel unempathetic or narcissistic? Where do you draw the line between loving your partner for exactly who they are, unconditionally, and not over-accommodating or sacrificing yourself in order to make the relationship work? 

What do you do if you tend to attract people who are more into you than you are into them? Do you really have to forgive someone when they’re not sorry they hurt you? How can you tell the difference between normal needs and entitled demands? Is it better to be stoic and unemotional or expressive and volatile? If you’re conflict avoidant or overly explosive, what does it mean to fight right? If you’re the Wendy to a Peter Pan, how do you deal with this? What if you’re the Peter Pan?

What if you can’t help falling for the most charismatic, charming, good-looking person in the room, even if you sense they might be narcissistic? What if you’re with someone who perceives any discussion of needs in a relationship as personal criticism or a sign that things are broker? 

What if you struggle with consent- letting others get away with overriding your consent or being the one who overrides someone else’s consent? How is protesting when someone hurts different from blaming someone? What if I’m with someone who doesn’t want to repair when they do something that hurts me?

How do you rebalance the power balance in a relationship where one person has most of the power and the other mostly submits? What do you do when your partner is projecting all over you and is completely blind to their tendency to do so? What do you do if you’re with a rugged individualist who feels entitled to make decisions on your behalf in ways that override your consent and leave you feel devastated? If you request boundaries or set limits on someone else’s behavior, are you being controlling?

“When we are intimate with another, we can be very, very hurt. We can become crazily jealous, possessive, obsessed, angry in ways we never thought possible, our spiritual practices shredding into near nonexistence in the storms of our pain and reactivity. Under such conditions it might seem that our capacity for awakening has been severely diminished, but that is from the viewpoint that sees only the turbulence, the chaos, the unpleasantness of what is happening.

However, in such rough and wild waters swirls another possibility, one equipped with nothing but a lifeline to our heartland. If we take hold of it, we start to recognize what’s right about what’s wrong; we treat the shit as compost; we let the pain tear open our heart; we learn to love when we are not being loved or don’t feel loved, and to give what we ache to be given.”  -Robert Augustus Masters, PhD, Transformation Through Intimacy

"In authentic relationships, our wounds become windows through which understanding and compassion can flow both ways." –Rachel Naomi Remen, MD

We Will Guide You Through

  •  Psychoeducation about what’s healthy and not healthy in relationships
  • How to take advantage of opportunities for healing in your relationships without spiritualizing or glorifying abuse as “my abuser is my teacher”
  • IFS guided meditations to help you get to know the parts on both sides of decisions regarding your relationships
  • Resolving confusion about healthy apology, real repair, & genuine forgiveness
  • ​IFS practices to guide you to the sanctuary within your own heart, one you can return to whenever you need refuge
  • ​Learning the 8 A’s of “fawning”- and what to do instead
  • ​Embodied practices to move the broken-hearted energy through your body so you can dare to risk opening your heart again

“The unruined heart is something that we all carry. You can feel like you’re completely wrecked… But there are essential things—the soul and the heart—that cannot be harmed or killed or ruined.” –Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Your Hosts

Dr. Lissa Rankin

Dr. Jeff Rediger

*All sessions will be recorded with unlimited availability.

“A friend is one to whom one can pour out all the contents of one’s heart—chaff and grain together—knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keeping what is worth keeping, and, with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away.” –George Eliot

Schedule

9:00 am - 3:00 pm PT | 11:00 am - 5:00 pm CT | 12:00 pm - 6:00 pm ET
Saturday, January 4th, 2025
9:00 am - 10:00 am PT
Opening Circle
We’ll open our circle and build safety and trust with a ritual intended to help you get clear on how you wish to journey with healing through relationships. We’ll use music, writing, movement, and art to process what arises when we enter into the field of love with our own parts around the topic of intimacy as a transformational path. We’ll also invite you to get clear about what specifically you’re wanting and needing out of the workshop, so we can tailor our offerings to meet the needs of those of you who answer the call to show up for this invitation to brave, boundaried love. 
10:00 am - 12:00 pm PT
Reciprocal & Non-Reciprocal Relationships
We’ll give you some previews into the content of the unpublished book Lissa and Jeff are writing together about what happens in the body, mind, and spirit when relationships aren’t equal- and how to rebalance power, break out of the classic narcissist/ codependent pair up, and establish more equality in any relationship. We’ll also discuss the kind of cultural, religious or spiritual indoctrination that helps keep unequal relationships unequal, so you can enter into self-inquiry with your own thoughts, beliefs, and spiritual ideas about the nature of relationships and how you show up in them. We’ll debunk the kinds of indoctrinated beliefs that often cause harm to victims of relational trauma, while propping up perpetrators and preventing victims from holding perpetrators accountable. But we’ll do so in the most trauma-informed way possible, holding out hope for perpetrators who want to heal- in relationship- alongside someone they may have harmed in the past, if that’s a safe option.

We’ll use writing prompts and breakout groups to support one another with our inquiries and our sincere seeking. And we’ll practice radical truth-telling, so we don’t sugar coat anything or lead you down a path of unattainable fantasy.

Lunch Break
After a brief break themselves, Lissa & Jeff will do Q&A during part of the lunch break. You can feel free to take a full hour long break and watch the replay after the course or you can stay and participate live.
1:00 pm - 3:00 am PT
Relationship Discernment 101 
We all love love, and it feels great to fall for someone. But if you’re dating or partnered, how can you tell if someone is safe and trustworthy as a potential partner for healing through intimate relationship? When we’re focused on personal or spiritual growth, it can be easy to rationalize tolerating abuse in the name of “This person is my teacher” or “Our souls chose each other to grow” or “I’m learning unconditional love” or “We’re twin flames.” While it’s true that we can alchemize whatever arises in intimate relationships as material for trauma healing and growth, it’s also true that trauma-bonded relationships might just harm us, without helping us very much. In this module, we’ll focus on red flags, green flags, how to spot the signs of a healthy relationship, what defines abuse, and what’s reasonable to expect with regard to how you deserve to be treated. We’ll also discuss what your ethical options are if someone isn’t treating you right.
Sunday, January 5th, 2025
9:00 am - 12:00 am PT
Relationships On The Spiritual Path
What does it mean to practice relationship as a healing path of personal and spiritual transformation, without using that lens as a justification for tolerating abuse? How can this idea be misunderstood or misguided? How can it be applied as a legitimately healthy way to heal relational wounds in relationship? We’ll discuss various healing methods that have been practiced and studied, including Internal Family Systems’ “You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For” work, Resmaa Menakem’s “Monsters in Love” work, Harville Hendrix’s “Imago” work, Sue Johnson’s Heal Me Tight, Terry Real’s Relational Life Therapy, Diane Poole Heller’s work on attachment styles, as well as the work of Robert Augustus Masters in Transformation Through Intimacy.

We’ll review the healing practices of cutting edge couple’s therapy model builders and examine how they overlap with what spiritual teachers get right and where they bypass actually healing the traumas that cause relational dysrfunction. You’ll be armed with resources for further study and practice, if any of these models resonate with you.

Lunch Break
After a brief break themselves, Lissa & Jeff will do Q&A during part of the lunch break. You can feel free to take a full hour long break and watch the replay after the course or you can stay and participate live.
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm PT
Orienting Your Relationship
What does it take to walk the razor’s edge between leaning into the relational healing opportunities in intimate relationship while also avoiding spiritual bypassing or other tendencies towards justifying, rationalizing, or glorifying abuse, conflict avoidance, and shirking accountability or failing to hold others to account? 

How can you care for your own beautiful “parts” while also caring about the needs of the parts of someone else- without throwing your own parts under the bus? 

How can you negotiate compromises without martyring yourself too much or sacrificing too many of your own priorities and needs? 

How can you stay reasonably safe while still taking the inevitable risks in relationships? How can you calm your own anxiety around abandonment, engulfment, betrayal, loss, or any other kind of heartbreak?

We’ll teach anyone who wants to learn how to practice peer-to-peer parts processing with another IFS buddy and give you instructions on how to make that a daily practice, if you wish. 

We’ll also review some other practices you can take home with you and begin to practice in your relationships, now or in the future when you find the right person to journey alongside. If you’re not currently in a relationship, we’ll offer practices you might employ to prepare yourself to be ready when the time is right. And there will be dancing…

“We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness'." -Beverly Clark, Shall We Dance

TESTIMONIALS

I crave this kind of authenticity. This is deeply compelling and satisfying. Thank you both. — Nancy 

What brought me here was a desire to live fully...wounds and all. I love the support of your community, Lissa. What better place to learn, love, and grow. — Donna

Thank you beautiful Lissa and Jeffrey. Thank you for sharing your lovely selves, which we particularly appreciated in this post election aftermath. Your presences were grounding and healing.  — Moon & Shirley

Thank you both so much. The timing of this course was like a god send for me. Thank you for helping me on my journey to healing and growth. — Zoe B.

Thank you Lissa and Jeffrey, this has been amazing and very timely for me. — Kristi L

Thank you for the time, info and energy you put into the workshop; I am taking much with me. — Lynn W.
Image Credit Monique Feil Photography

Bonuses

Relationships on the Spiritual Path

BONUS MODULE 1: When You’re Single & Wish You Weren’t
Led by Lissa and Katherine Woodward Thomas
So many on the spiritual path find themselves without a committed romantic partner. Why is this? How do we deal with the longing for union with the human beloved when we’re still without the partner of our dreams? Calling in The One and Conscious Uncoupling author Katherine Woodward Thomas will help us explore a series of questions that relate to conscious co-creation in relationships. Is finding “The One” all about attracting the right person? Or is it more about becoming the person who will magnetize the Beloved? Do we need to practice our “law of attraction” practices? Or do we need to surrender and let go of attachment to outcomes? Or both? How do we avoid the ego’s desperate grasping for that which we desire so deeply without demonizing our deepest desires? How do we surrender this yearning to the Divine and trust Divine Will even if it means being alone? How do we consciously hold both the vulnerability of the longing and the trust in surrender in paradox, avoiding the tendency to either force the wrong relationship into being or the tendency to use the spiritual bypass to skip the pain of the deep longing? Is there anything we can do to facilitate calling in “The One?” Or are we meant to let go completely and give up our dream of partnership in resignation? Is the story of “The One” outdated, or is a new story emerging that allows us to have many “The Ones?”
BONUS MODULE 2: “Expectation Hangovers” in Relationships
Led by Lissa and Christine Hassler
If we’re all supposed to meet “The One” and live happily ever after, stay close with all our family members, cultivate friendships that last a lifetime, and be in conscious relationships with all our colleagues, how come life is so full of disappointment in relationships? How do we have navigate the “expectation hangovers” that accompany relationships? It can be tempting to use spiritual tools to bypass the pain of disappointment or to negate such feelings, judging them as “unspiritual.” But disappointment hurts—and we are beautifully human with sensitive hearts. So how do we navigate the pain of disappointment consciously? Perhaps when the ego gets everything it wants, it doesn’t grow much. Yet perhaps the soul grows most when we are disappointed. Still, we can’t use the awareness of soul growth as a spiritual bypass to avoid dealing with painful feelings like disappointment. How can we use disappointment in relationships to alchemize transformation while also treating ourselves gently and with compassion?
BONUS MODULE 3: Commitment: The Soul’s Prison or an Alchemical Crucible? Led by Lissa and Anne Davin, PhD
When we enter into marriage, we promise to stay together until death parts us. But is this kind of promise possible when two people are changing over the course of a lifetime? What happens if two souls learn what they are meant to learn together and then find it is time to part ways? What about loyalty? What about using the difficult times that inevitably arise in relationships to be a crucible of transformation and an exploration of deep intimacy? How do you know when it’s time to stick it out and let your ego and your pride be dismantled by the relationship, and how do you know when to choose self-respect and the freedom of the unbridled soul by leaving the relationship? What if you are committed to a relationship but it becomes abusive? What if your values fly in the face of what is being asked of you by your soul? Is there a way to avoid the temptation to go “all or nothing” in intimate relationships? Can you dial a relationship up when trust is solid and dial it down when trust is betrayed without ending the relationship or violating your own boundaries?
BONUS MODULE 4: When Others Don't Want You to Wake Up
Led by Lissa and Joan Borysenko, PhD
When you’re deeply committed to the spiritual path, you may find that others really don’t want you to wake up. Maybe your entire friendship was built on eating ice cream together, but now you’re committed to conscious eating and you’ve gone vegan. Maybe all you did was gossip together, but now you’ve gotten out of your victim story, and it doesn’t feel good to gossip.
 
Maybe you were the perfect key wound to his lock wound, but now you want to heal the wound instead, and he doesn’t. What do you do? How do you save those relationships? There’s a conscious way to commit to your soul path without alienating your entire social circle, but even when you navigate this process with supreme sensitivity and consciousness, you may find that those you love are dropping off faster than you can handle the emotional rollercoaster of loss and grief. How happens to friendships and family relationships when you’re on the spiritual fast track? You may find yourself struggling through challenging times of loneliness as you deepen your spiritual journey. How do we navigate this time of loneliness consciously? How can we keep our fear of abandonment, rejection, and social isolation from holding us back on the spiritual path? How can we find comfort when it feels like everyone is leaving? How can we resist grasping for what we want or resisting what we don’t want? How do we find peace as our vibration shifts and relationships change? 

Buried within this conversation is one of the core principles of spiritual life. When you learn this one tool, everything changes. As a psychologist, longtime spiritual practitioner, participant in many diverse relationships that have grown her, and holder of deep feminine wisdom, Joan Borysenko has a lot to say about relationships, and we’ll be blessed to have her wisdom facilitating this module.
BONUS MODULE 5: Spiritual Surrender & Conscious Break Ups
Led by Lissa and Tosha Silver
It’s easy to practice our spiritual values when we’re in the honeymoon phase of a relationship. But what about when things get rough? What if things don’t go as planned? What happens when we grow apart or experience betrayals and conflict? What if it’s time to break up? Is it possible to break up and stay in love? Is it possible to navigate the minefields of divorce without turning into raving lunatics who forget our spiritual practices when we become afraid and feel threatened? What if you’re going through a divorce and you’re committed to unconditional love and forgiveness, but your partner is trying to screw you? What if the legal system is making you forget everything you learned from your spiritual teachings? What if you’re so reactive during a break up—whether it’s a marriage, a business partnership, a friendship, or a family tie that’s breaking—that you lose touch with your deep soul truth? How do we return to love while still protecting ourselves during the end of a relationship? How might we reframe the break-up, so it’s not viewed as a failure, but rather as the end of a spiritual teaching and the conscious dissolution of a soul agreement? How might we move consciously through anger, judgment, hurt, and disappointment, not by bypassing those painful feelings, but by feeling them fully and letting those energies move through us so we can return to love?
BONUS Module 6: Sacred Sexuality
Led by Lissa and Rachel Carlton Abrams, MD
In many Western religions, sex is perceived as profane, while spirituality is sacred. Sex happens below the waist, but spirituality happens above the neck, right? Yet this sexuality/spirituality split happens more in the West than in the East. In many Eastern cultures, sex and spirituality are seen as inseparable. Most likely, you have at least glimpsed this possibility in your own sexuality, when the borders between two humans can dissolve and you feel yourself becoming One with another human being, when you gaze into the eyes of your beloved and you see God or Goddess, mirrored back to you through the eyes of Love Itself. 

How can we be separate from God when we are coming into such deep union with another human being? Why has the church threatened to cut us off from sexuality as an ecstatic path to the Divine? What would it mean if we embraced sexuality fully as part of our spiritual practice, not just in sexual union with another, but in our own masturbation practices? What if we can make love to the God within ourselves in a conscious way? 
BONUS Module 7: When Death Doesn’t Part You
Led by Lissa and Kris Carlson
What happens when you love someone so deeply and with such a purity of heart connection that you cannot be cleaved, even by death? Heart Broken Open author Kris Carlson experiences this ever since her husband Richard Carlson, author of Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff, died unexpectedly a decade ago, leaving behind his young wife and two children. How do we handle it when death doesn’t end a relationship? How can we navigate the loss of a loved one in a conscious way? If love never ends, why does it hurt so much to lose someone’s physical presence? How do we allow the heartbreak of grief and loss to break us open rather than shut us down? When you’ve experienced repetitive heartbreak, whether through death or breaking up, how do you keep the heart open and resist the temptation to lock down the heart? How do you avoid what Brene Brown calls “foreboding joy,” that tendency to shut down your joy because you can’t stand the vulnerability of how much you have to lose? What does it mean to keep giving your loved ones permission to break your heart, even when you’re experiencing so much pain? What if your dead loved one still communicates with you? 

Does that mean you’re crazy or in denial, or is it true that love never ends? When is it time to move one and let go? As conscious, evolving beings of love, how can we handle the pain in a way that grows us, rather than contracts us? 

We’ve all lost loved ones, whether through death, abandonment, or rejection. These painful soul lessons are potent opportunities to move through the pain, to let the pain course through your body and your heart like waves of the ocean, and to let the pain soften the soil around your heart so your heart can blossom.the pain, to let the pain course through your body and your heart like waves of the ocean, and to let the pain soften the soil around your heart so your heart can blossom.
BONUS MODULE 8: Calling In Your Soul Community
Led by Lissa and Lisette Schuitemaker of the Findhorn Foundation
Relationships aren’t just about two people. They’re about networks of people who come together and exchange as cells in one larger body of humanity. When we are socially isolated, our nervous systems go into 'fight or flight’, the body’s self-healing mechanisms are disabled, and we become prone to illness, depression and what the shamans call 'soul sickness.’ Loneliness is the #1 public health issue in our society right now. Yet we have a choice. In this module, we’ll dive into inquiry around this topic. What lies at the root of loneliness? Why is it possible to feel lonelier when you’re surrounded by crowds of people than when you’re alone? If social isolation is bad for the body, what about introverts? Is it better to be in community? And what about living with the “wrong” people—is that an option or is it preferable then to be alone? How do we find the friends of our soul, rather than the friends of our ego? What if you’re single and live alone? What can you do to call in your soul community? Why do so many feel so helpless in the face of their loneliness? What can we do as conscious, caring beings to help ease the loneliness of others? Is the 'cure' for loneliness an inside job or an outside job—or both? 

To facilitate this conversation, I’m inviting Lisette Schuitemaker to join me. Lisette is chair of the board of the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, which is one of the longest running intentional communities and ecovillages in the world. We’ll discuss her concept of “othering” and “enemy-making” and how we can choose to shift from “me consciousness” to “we consciousnsess.” We also hope to hear from those of you who have found unique ways to call in your soul tribe. We are all in this together.
BONUS MODULE: The Basics of Internal Family Systems 
Video class- with Lissa Rankin

For those new to Internal Family Systems (IFS), this online class about The Basics of Internal Family Systems (IFS) outlines the IFS model and teaches the difference between protector parts (managers and firefighters,) wounded exiles, and the wise, mature Self that heals all parts. It also describes the 6F's of "Getting To Know Your Protectors" and teaches the steps of "Unburdening The Exiles." It also offers a lens on trauma-informed medicine and how IFS might be used to help treat difficult medical and psychiatric conditions that conventional medicine might struggle to cure.

Healing Through Relationship

Intimacy as a Path of Transformation

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Dr. Lissa Rankin

Lissa Rankin, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Mind Over Medicine and six other books, is a former OB/GYN physician, founder of the Whole Health Medicine Institute training program for doctors and therapists, radical remission researcher, and founder of the health equity, trauma healing based non-profit Heal At Last. After leaving her job in conventional medicine in 2007, Lissa began experimenting in her integrative medicine practice with what really helps resolve symptoms in people with chronic illness who have failed to improve with either conventional medicine or alternative medicine. All roads led to the same conclusion: People who are not responding to other treatments often have untreated, unhealed trauma, and treating that trauma can sometimes lead to seemingly miraculous radical remissions.

Upon realizing this epiphany, Lissa became a passionate ambassador for raising awareness about the importance of treating trauma as both preventive medicine and medical treatment for hard-to-treat mental and physical illnesses. Because old school psychoanalysis (talk therapy) and therapies like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) do not effectively treat trauma on their own, and because medication, surgeries, and even most alternative medicine or spiritual healing techniques, such as acupuncture, meditation, or energy healing, only treat the symptoms of trauma, 

Lissa became a devoted student of many forms of trauma therapy, including Richard Schwartz, Ph.D.’s Internal Family Systems (IFS), Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, Lawrence Heller’s NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM), and Asha Clinton, Ph.D.’s Advanced Integrative Therapy (AIT.) She also teaches about spiritual bypassing recovery for those who have used spirituality as a way to avoid healing their trauma.

In addition to her public health advocacy and health care reform activism, Lissa leads workshops- online, at US retreat centers like Esalen, 1440, Omega, and Kripalu, and internationally. During the pandemic, Lissa played a public role in debunking “Conspirituality,” the Covid denialism, anti-vaccination propaganda, and conspiracy theories promoted by many wellness, yoga, mind-body medicine, alternative medicine, and spirituality influencers who got “red-pilled” during 2020. This shakeout anchored her as a physician influencer to trust who is grounded in science, open to the mystical, spiritually aware, and trauma-informed. Lissa is currently co-writing her eighth book with Harvard psychiatrist Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv about the link between relational trauma and medical illness and how healthy boundaries and Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy can help reverse diseases related to nervous system dysregulation caused by relational trauma. Lissa lives with her partner Jeff Rediger and her housemate April Sweazy in the Bay Area, now that her daughter has flown the nest. She thrives on daily hikes in nature, dancing with her Bay Area dance community, singing, writing, DJ'ing music whenever she can, and healthy gourmet cooking.

Dr. Jeff Rediger

Jeffrey Rediger MD, MDiv, is a best-selling author, a licensed physician and psychiatrist, and on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. He was the medical director of McLean SE and Community Affairs at McLean Hospital in Boston for 22 years, and concurrently for many years also the Chief of Behavioral Medicine at Good Samaritan Medical Center. In addition to his medical and psychiatric training, he has a Master of Divinity in theology and philosophy of science from Princeton Theological Seminary. His investigations into remarkable recoveries from incurable or fatal illnesses have been featured on the Oprah Winfrey, Dr. Oz, and Anderson Cooper 360 shows, among others. 

He has been nominated for the National Bravewell Leadership Award and has received many awards for leadership and patient care. His best-selling book, Cured: Strengthen Your Immune System and Heal Your Life, has been published in 22 languages so far and is available at both local bookstores and online.

Jeff is excited to participate in this class because the topic is very near and dear to his heart on a personal level. Having just survived a devastating series of traumas during the pandemic that caused him to rethink how he'd been living his life and the priorities he'd been putting first, he just took a leap of faith, stepped down as medical director at Harvard's Mclean SE into the uncertainty of his next creative career choices, sold his home in Boston, moved to California after decades on the East Coast, started aggressive trauma treatment, signed a book deal so he can write about what happened to him and make good use of everything he's learning in his trauma recovery, and is actively reviewing his life in order to reorient his future. He's motivated to co-teach this class in order to help people who might be stuck and in denial about how their lives are going so far live more authentically and do what's within your power to accomplish your dreams.
Frequently Asked Questions:
How do I contact customer service?
Please contact us by sending an email to support@lissarankin.com
What kind of technology will I need in order to participate?
All you’ll need is a computer or a smartphone and internet access in order to participate. All live calls will be on Zoom.
What if I can't attend a session when it takes place ? 
All sessions are recorded so if you can't attend the live session you'll be able to soak up the juicy teachings, healing intentions, and spiritual energy of this course at any time it’s convenient for you.
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If  the cost of this program presents a financial hardship then we hope you will contact us for a sliding scale option. Please write to support@lissarankin.com